88 IF , ... '1 may want to sit. Just give me a chance to process thlS." . ume I of "Mastering the Art of French Cooking"-the tyrannical and gifted Simone Beck, known as Simca, and Louisette Bertholle. Many of the students were from the United States, and soon Julia had the idea of writing a manual of French coolung for her fellow-citizens, a project that would be guided by two pre- VIously untried principles: that the ingre- dients should be readily available in the United States, and that the recipes should illustrate fundamental techniques, so that eventually the American cook might go beyond the recipes included in the book and independently create other dishes in the French style. The idea was to repro- duce for Americans the experience ofhav- ing learned from childhood the art of French cooking. This meant that she would have to break down the techniques that French cooks took for granted into teachable steps, like dancing lessons, or the rules of grammar. She called this the order of battle. But she was not fighting a war. She was translating one culinary lan- guage into another. The classic French cookery books, by Escoffier, Pelleprat, Mme. St. Ange, and others, assumed that French cooks learned from their mothers how to brown a chicken in butter and oil, for example, or to leave potato slices unrinsed, so that their starch holds them together in a galette or a pommes Anna. (Even Ehza- beth DaVId, the great English cookery writer, felt safe telling her reader to make . a poule-au-pot by "browning the chicken all over in good dripping and butter.") But Julia must have learned from her own mistakes that a chicken sauté will never brown if it is damp, and that grated or sliced potatoes that have been rinsed of their starch won't hold a shape; that burned chocolate will separate and turn grainy; that yolks will curdle, sugar will burn, and yeast won't rise at excessive temperatures. To readers who have never scorched chocolate or waited in vain for a chicken to brown, these details may seem trivial; to the thousands of American cooks who have learned from Julia Child's books, these and countless other precau- tions have become everyday wisdom Even years later, on the television series vvith master chefs and bakers, Julia is seen bent over the stove, marvelling at this or that technique and explaining it to her viewers. The elucidation of technique is Julia Child's great achievement, and it culminated in her masterpiece, "The Way to Cook," published in 1989. F ROM the very first chapters of Fitch's biograph)T, on which she labored for five years, intervievving many vvitnesses and unreflectively appropriating the ob- servations and opinions of many others, plucked from decades of clip files, it is clear that she knew little about food when she began, and learned nothing as she wrote. It is misleading to say that the pro- moters of nouvelle cuisine were Influenced THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 13. 1997 by the butter-crazed geniuses Point, Pic, and Dumaine when in fact they departed from those masters radicall It is even less forgivable to describe what seems to be pommes soufflées as "a puffed up po- tatò' --a description that will leave readers who may be unfamiliar vvith this delight- :fiù preparation to wonder how one inflates an entIre potato. Actuall)T, pommes souf- flées are thin, longitudinal potato slices, rinsed of their starch, patted dry, and plunged briefly into moderately hot oil until the edges begin to seal, then re- moved from the oil, left to cool and drain, and finally dropped, a few at a time, into much hotter oil, so that the moisture trapped within explosively vaporizes, transforming the potato slices into deli- cate, blimplike cushions that float to the surface and are forced by the cook back into the oil vvith a skimmer, so that the ex- quisitely thin exteriors crisp and brown evenly before the potatoes are removed, drained once more, then laid on an artfully folded linen napkin and brought warm to the table. This dish was served vvith flair in the nineteen-fifties-and perhaps it still is at the Grand Véfour (to mention only the most illustrious venue), the great eighteenth-century restaurant, with tall, faded mirrors and worn carpets, housed on the ground floor of the Palais- Royal- when Paul and J uliawere first married, and he, head over heels in love, was teach- ing his still mostly innocent new wife how to eat in such places and also, as Fitch suggests, how to make love. These lessons she seems effortlessl)T, indeed merril)T, to have learned and to have gone on learn- Ing, hand in hand vvith Paul, almost until the end of their lives together. To dwell on Fitch's failings as a writer, or to let them spoil the pleasure to be had from an encounter vvith her gracious, if maltreated, subject, who emerges battered and misshapen but alive and cheerful from the rubble of this biograph)T,would be a piìJ Even the clumsiest of writers cannot dull a woman who, vvith a hand- ful of no less spunky contemporaries- Dr. King, Jane Jacobs, Dr. Spock, Rachel Carson, Betty Friedan, perhaps Helen Gurley Brown-has given her fellow- Americans the confidence to challenge the life-denying follies of their times. The source of Julia Child's powers is partly genetic. To the late Dr. Pritiken, who complained shortly before his un- timely death about her enthusiasm for butter and vvine, she suggested a regime